COIL-Group "Team New Innsbruck"
Team New Innsbruck
Our group consists of Nukhba and Matt from the University of New Orleans and Luise, Michelle, Julian, and Lorenz from the University of Innsbruck. Although we all attended the same course, we have different approaches to the topic of history, since we all study different subjects, such as languages, anthropology, etc. That ensured a lot of interesting conversations that we shared over the past few weeks.
For us Cultural Online International Learning (COIL) was a very enjoyable experience and we had a great time exchanging different stories about ourselves. It was nice to meet new people. Of course, we had some limitations because of meeting online, such as limited time. The fact that online interactions are always less personal than talking in person was obviously present, but we nevertheless had a lot of fun with our discussions. Those usually revolved a lot around food (what specialties we have in our region, what we like and dislike, …) and how life is different between Austria and the United States. We spent our time with these topics to learn more about each other.
Nukhba and Matt were kind enough to share their experiences conducting their interviews and answered questions from the Innsbruck students. That information was helpful for all future interviews that the students from Innsbruck still had to conduct.
Our discussions were not always about food, we also had a very lively discussion about public history and our different viewpoints on it. We came to the conclusion that there is not one definition of the term and it depends on the perspective, but also on the goal you have when presenting history. For us, public history can consist of different actions, such as informing the public, or how the public writes/perceives history.
All in all, we had a great time and broadened our culinary horizon.